Marking the way forward

One of the most important tools a teacher has for assessing students’ progress in the classroom is marking their work.

It is an immediate insight into each child’s understanding of the lesson’s learning objective and can provide clues and hints to teachers that may not be so obvious in a busy classroom environment. 

Gone are the days of ‘see me’ scrawled in red ink and to this end, marking has become a very important element of day-to-day teaching. There can be no doubting, marking comes with the territory of teaching, but many times I have seen rather lack lustre or abrupt attempts that would make even the most conscientious of students want to give up trying. 

Marking should be informative and ultimately useful for students. It is a way of concisely guiding and even though there may be errors, they need to be analysed to highlight where the student went wrong. 

Where you can, teachers also need to highlight a positive area of the work as well, to demonstrate to the student an area of the learning objective that they understood.

• When you mark a student’s work you are testing their understanding of the learning objective that was set at the beginning of the lesson. To this end, you need to mark to the objective as this is what you wanted your class to know and the work they have done highlights how much they have learned.
• Be specific. A quick ‘good job’ or ‘well done’ doesn’t tell the child what they have done well at all. You don’t have to write an essay, but a quick statement such as, ‘well done on using some brilliant adjectives in your story’ can focus in on both the learning objective and what a child has done well at the same time.
• Stick to your school’s assessment policy on marking. This will ensure that marking is consistent throughout the school and will have much more of an impact on standards over time.
• Highlight careless mistakes, but don’t correct them. You can make the marking process last forever if you correct every mistake or write an essay about how they can improve. Keep
  sentences simple and useful and get the children to correct their mistakes – it’s their work after all.

Feedback through marking is vitally important for children to develop and grow in confidence and understanding in school,  so when school books come home, looking at the quality of work and the accompanying marking can give parents a clear indication of their child’s relationship with both school and learning.

As a result parents can make use of the information gained from effective marking as it will help them when they are studying with their children at home. It can also help build a good relationship with the teacher so if there is anything that they don’t understand or perhaps something they disagree with, parents can communicate effectively.

Finally, an absence of marking is never a good thing and it very rarely happens, but if it does, parents should report it to the school as it is completely unacceptable.